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New York City plans a fitting memorial for Frank McCourt; the Kindle may finally debut in the U.K. this month; Disney rolls out an electronic storybook site; Paige M. Gutenborg starts work at Harvard; and other news.
A small print-on-demand firm can go ahead with its antitrust suit against Amazon; the EU ponders its answer to Google Book Search; Shakespeare’s grave gets a much-needed overhaul; Banned Books Week leaves its mark on the best-seller lists; and other news.
In the first major overseas legal challenge to its massive book-scanning project, Google’s French division was hit last week with a copyright infringement lawsuit. Publishing group La Martinière, backed by the editors association Syndicat national de l’édition (SNE) and the writers union Société des gens de lettres (SGDL), is asking a Paris court to force the Internet giant to halt its digitization of protected works and to levy a fine of eighteen million euros (about $26 million) as well as a per diem fine of one hundred thousand euros ($146,000).
A month after signing a distribution deal with the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, online publishing platform Smashwords announced on Tuesday that it has reached a similar arrangement with Sony. Authors who upload their work to Smashwords through Sony’s new “Publisher Portal” can expect to see it added to the Sony e-book catalogue in as little as ten days, the company said.
About a week shy of its first anniversary, online magazine the Daily Beast is getting into the book business. On Monday, editor Tina Brown announced a joint venture with Perseus Books to release a series of short, topical e-books quickly followed by paperback editions. The new imprint, Beast Books, plans to publish three to five titles in the next year.
Two of the country’s most prominent newspapers announced significant changes to their book coverage last week. The Chicago Tribune not only reformatted its Saturday books page but officially launched Printers Row, a literary blog featuring expanded content and contributions from readers. The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, scrapped its usual best-seller list on Sunday in favor of lists provided by the Northern California Independent Bookseller Association.
A panel of international writers has chosen Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude as the book that has most influenced world literature over the past twenty-five years. The survey, commissioned by international literary magazine Wasafiri, coincided with the release last Friday of the quarterly’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue.
Steve Rubin, best known as the publisher of John Grisham and Dan Brown, announced yesterday that he is stepping down as executive vice president and publisher-at-large of Random House, effective next Friday. The sixty-seven-year-old Rubin, a former journalist, said he was moving on to pursue other opportunities, including a book deal of his own with “one of the finest publishers in the industry.”
